Mike Weiner

July 11, 2009

Michael Weiner is an entrepreneur who has started nine companies. He is the founder and CEO of Technology Innovations, LLC, which works with leading universities and innovators throughout the United States. These companies are involved in various biotech projects, with a heavy emphasis on innovation and intellectual property, working with leading universities and innovators throughout the United States. Mike has extensive experience in licensing, having negotiated over 150 licenses producing tens of millions of dollars in licensing revenue from products with gross sales of several hundred million dollars.

The best known of these is the award winning Word Finder thesaurus, brought to market by Microlytics, a company Mike founded in 1985 as a spin-off of Xerox, which has sold or licensed over 6 million copies for the IBM PC, Macintosh and handheld devices under several brands. A Pocket Books paper edition of the Word Finder thesaurus sold over 250,000 copies.

The thesaurus is well known as the one Wm. F. Buckley, Jr., said was “a bloody miracle” and changed his life and which the NY Times called the best electronic thesaurus on the market. Word Finder won many awards, including MacWorld Best Utility.

After several years owning and operating a commercial fishing boat off the Florida east coast, Mike joined Xerox Corporation (“they hired me right off the boat”). While at Xerox, Mike served in a variety of capacities in sales and marketing, and in his spare time wrote and published Proportional Spacing on WordStar under the Writing Consultants label, and produced a series of shipwreck maps known as Wreck Charts.

In 1985, after a ten year career at Xerox, Mike founded Microlytics, a Xerox spin-off company which developed advanced compression technology from the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), used in a suite of products with licenses to companies including Microsoft, Symantec, Casio, Canon, Sharp, Seiko, Smith Corona, SEC, Apple, WordPerfect, and Fuji Xerox. Microlytics merged with Selectronics, a public company, in 1990.

In 1994 Mike co-founded TextWise with Dr. Elizabeth D. Liddy, a professor of linguistics at Syracuse University and created the DR-LINK search engine. TextWise received over $12 million in government research grants from DARPA, ORD, NIMA, USAF, and DoD, and TextWise received the Tibbet’s Award from the United States Department of Commerce for its innovative SBIR research projects in natural language processing.

Mike holds 30 issued patents and has numerous patents pending, including as co-inventor with Wilson Greatbatch (inventor of the implantable cardiac pacemaker) and Patrick R. Connelly of an MRI-compatible pacemaker.